Storage Market Predictions, 2003

Transcription

1 Storage Market Predictions, 2003 Dataquest Predicts Abstract: Changing vendor dynamics and evolving strategic technologies will determine the shape of various storage markets. By Roger W. Cox, Carolyn DiCenzo, John Monroe, James Opfer and Pushan Rinnen Strategic Planning Assumptions At least one major HDD merger, alliance or abdication will be announced in 2003 (0.8 probability). Leading portfolio vendors will represent 47 percent of the external RAID controllerbased storage market by the end of 2004 (0.7 probability). In 2003, NAS and SAN convergence will increase penetration, with midrange and highend NAS becoming more flexible (0.8 probability). By 2004, broad acceptance of storage network architectures will minimize the value of modularity at the network edge (0.8 probability). By the end of 2006, traditional backup products that do not manage data based on recovery time objectives will cease to be significant players in the enterprise market (0.7 probability). Publication Date: October 31, 2002

2 2 Storage Market Predictions, 2003 Introduction The following document delineates a few of Gartner Dataquest's key predictions and recommendations for the makers and users of storage components, systems, fabric architectures and management software. Gartner Dataquest Perspective Prediction No. 1 There Will Be Further HDD Industry Consolidation in 2003 Seagate acquired Conner Peripherals in Maxtor acquired the hard disk drive (HDD) division of Quantum in Between 1998 and 2001, Integral Peripherals, Conner Technology, Calluna Technology and Halo Data Devices went out of business. In August 2001, Fujitsu announced that it would cease production of all desktop-class HDDs. There were 67 HDD suppliers in There were eight suppliers at the beginning of In December 2001, Gartner Dataquest predicted that "at least one major HDD player will choose to exit the market or be consumed by a competitor in 2002." This happened. Hitachi and IBM announced their intent to form a new joint venture HDD company on 16 April A definite agreement was announced on 4 June Barring unforeseen circumstances, the legal merger of Hitachi's and IBM's respective HDD divisions will be consummated prior to January Counting the Hitachi/IBM merger, there are currently seven HDD suppliers Seagate, Maxtor, Western Digital, Hitachi/IBM, Samsung, Toshiba and Fujitsu. By the end of 2004, there will be five or fewer HDD suppliers. There will also be consolidation on the component supply side. It seems likely that Fuji Electric will eventually handle all independent (noncaptive) HDD media production for Japan (displacing Mitsubishi ChemicalandShowaDenko).Read-Rite,atroubledbutverycapable maker of HDD head technology deeply in need of additional funding, will be purchased by an independent HDD supplier or venture group or will cease operations during The HDD industry has not seen a real and protracted component shortage for some time, but certain essential components will soon become harder to obtain. In addition to the disruptions that may be caused by mergers or abdications, as areal densities increase, factory yields may decline for longer periods of time during product transitions, and it will become hardertomanufactureadequatevolumesofreliablehdds. Semiconductor and media suppliers will soon have to overcome many crucial difficulties (especially as areal densities increase beyond 100 Gbits/in. 2 ), but the head makers are already encountering great obstacles. Because of consolidation and deepening difficulties in manufacturing advanced technologies, limited supplies of critical components during the

3 3 next five years will play a much greater role in determining industry conditions than during the last five years. Consolidation brings a degree of clarity that is often missing in overcrowded markets. It also, inevitably, engenders operational challenges. It may also bring a change in the way the drive makers conduct business with major accounts. In 2003, one should expect more stable pricing, more difficult product transitions and more inconsistent supplies of finished goods. Be prepared for a shift in power from buyers to sellers in various HDD markets. Plan for longer product cycles and unexpected shortages. Begin the painful process of establishing longer-term commitments with suppliers. Prediction No. 2 Leading Portfolio Vendors Will Gain External RAID Controller- Based Storage Systems Market Share in 2002 and Beyond Portfolio vendors sell external redundant array of inexpensive disk (RAID) controller-based storage as well as servers. The four largest worldwide portfolio vendors are IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Sun and Dell. Each vendor has been making substantial investments and striking strategic relationships to improve the competitive status of its external RAID controller-based storage product offerings. These initiatives do not necessarily mean that the portfolio vendors provide the best storage solution but, coupled with attractive storage, server, software and services bundled pricing propositions, they can present a compelling capital investment package to end users that, if nothing else, is good enough. Collectively, these four portfolio vendors have steadily increased external RAID controller-based storage market share from 29.1 percent in 1998 to 39.5 percent in Moreover, in 2001, buoyed by the XP series, HP recaptured the external RAID controller-based storage market share lead in the HP-UX market. IBM increased its market share of external RAID controller-based storage associated with the zseries server by 17.1 percentage points, recapturing the market share lead in this historically demanding market category. Dell, even before the strategic relationship with EMC, increased its external RAID controller-based storage market share associated with Intel-based servers running Microsoft Windows NT/2000 by an impressive 2.1 percentage points. Beyond the above, observing that Dell's strategic relationship with EMC is gaining momentum and with Sun experiencing success selling the new SE9900 series in association with Sun Solaris servers, it is not unreasonable to expect these two vendors to continue to gain share in the external RAID controller-based storage market.

4 4 Storage Market Predictions, 2003 As we look to the future, Gartner Dataquest has projected that the highest growth opportunity for external RAID controller-based storage will be in the Windows NT/2000, Linux and Unix markets. Much of that growth, particularly in the Windows NT/2000 and Linux markets, will be generated by small-to-midsize enterprises. Small-to-midsize enterprises tend to buy their storage and servers from the same provider. This purchasing characteristic very much favors the portfolio vendor. Continued intense competition between vendors will enable end users to maximize tight capital budgets for storage IT infrastructure assets. Vendors that sell disk storage systems must emphasize and quantify total cost of ownership (TCO) benefits beyond the price of the discrete disk storage system. From an end-user perspective, the costs associated with defining, configuring, installing, managing and servicing the storage infrastructure far exceed initial disk storage system acquisition costs. Prediction No. 3 NAS Will Become More Flexible The network-attached storage (NAS) market is developing into two distinctive camps plug-and-play appliances at the low end and more flexible products in the midrange and high end. NAS was created as an appliance product embodied by Network Appliance filers and Quantum Snap Servers. Despite the inflexible characteristic of early NAS appliances, the simple setup and easy management of such appliances addressed the fast growing market demand in the late 1990s. Today, although the benefits of appliances are still valid to lower administrative cost, some customers are demanding midrange and high-end NAS products to be more flexible for better TCO. In the midrange, Dell de-coupled NAS heads from their attached storage arraysandallowedthesamenasheadtobeabletoattachtosmall computer systems interface (SCSI) arrays, Fibre Channel (FC) arrays, or a FC SAN switch (for NAS/storage area network [SAN] convergence). In the high end, Network Appliance created NAS/SAN unified products that can simultaneously serve file and FC block access with one simple management tool. EMC's Celerra, besides its ability to attach to a Symmetrix directly or to a Symmetrix SAN, now also supports CLARiiON arrays in the direct-attached mode. NAS software from Veritas provides customers with even more flexibility in terms of hardware choices. Although those products are flexible in different ways and at different levels, such flexibility will fuel NAS growth in Flexible NAS products will appeal to many customers that want to move to a fabric-attached storage (FAS) architecture but with limited budget. For vendors that already have relatively flexible NAS products, they should advocate the TCO benefits of such products to the fullest while

5 5 improving on management compatibility and simplicity. Those vendors that don't have flexible NAS should pursue a strategy of more flexibility without sacrificing future revenue. Prediction No. 4 Embedded Products Will Drive Down Storage Networking Costs Because of the increased maturity of the market for SAN components, it is now feasible to embed products in servers and storage systems. Application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) on the server motherboard displace host bus adapters (HBAs) and switch blades displace some standalone switch products. As embedded products reduce costs especially the incremental cost of server connection to a SAN at the expense of flexibility, the following are likely to be experienced in 2003: Increased SAN connection of commodity servers Increased emphasis on interoperability Changing market for low-end HBAs Embedded products establish the minimum entry cost for SAN deployment. Successful deployment depends on and reinforces the position of established architectures. Enterprises should plan for lower costs of entry-level SAN deployment. Vendors of SAN components should tailor their strategies to accommodate expanded opportunities. Specific manifestations of the impact of embedded products will include: Intense competition between FC and iscsi for low cost SAN deployment Improved interchangeability of switch products that interoperate with embedded products Intersection of blade server and SAN technology Prediction No. 5 Backup Products Morph Into Recovery Products That Manage the Use of Replication and HSM, and Traditional Tape Protection Approaches, to Manage Recovery Time Objectives As the shift from "time to backup" to "time to recovery" increasingly takes hold, companies will begin to more effectively deploy replication as a recovery option for critical applications on a selective basis. Backup product vendors will expand from providing replication options to be used in the traditional backup process to becoming data protection products that, at first, embrace replication and traditional tape backup options but then move on to leverage hierarchical storage management (HSM) technologies, becoming true data management solutions.

6 6 Storage Market Predictions, 2003 Data protection products providing recovery options based on replication or HSM technology will continue to appear and claim to be the recovery alternative to tape backup. These products will capture pockets of the market and will serve to increase awareness of the potential for other protection approaches. Backup vendors that already have added support for replication as part of the traditional backup process should concentrate future development efforts on building the policy infrastructure into their products to begin the evolution to a data management solutions that leverage multiple protection options with various recovery time characteristics. IT departments should begin to define recovery time objectives for various sets of data and begin to deploy new approaches on a pilot basis. Key Issues What changes in technologies and vendor dynamics will shape the storage industry? How will mergers, acquisitions, partnerships and alliances change the competitive climate of various storage markets? What emerging storage technologies will enable new business opportunities and how will they affect already established storage markets? This document has been published to the following Marketplace codes: HARD-WW-DP-0375 For More Information... In North America and Latin America: In Europe, the Middle East and Africa: In Asia/Pacific: In Japan: Worldwide via gartner.com: Entire contents 2002 Gartner, Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduction of this publication in any form without prior written permission is forbidden. The information contained herein has been obtained from sources believed to be reliable. Gartner disclaims all warranties as to the accuracy, completeness or adequacy of such information. Gartner shall have no liability for errors, omissions or inadequacies in the information contained herein or for interpretations thereof. The reader assumes sole responsibility for the selection of these materials to achieve its intended results. The opinions expressed herein are subject to change without notice